Re: Mirrors not allowing Directory Listings

Hallo Carsten,

I speak german so feel free to reply in German if you prefer that.
Thanks for your answer, and you can of course ignore the message I wrote
to ftp@halifax after writing to debian-mirrors.

I appreciate your answer and understand the motivation behind it, but
this is a major nuisance for many users of your service.

On Mon, Jun 14, 2021 at 08:22:48AM +0100, Carsten Otto wrote:
> We disabled directory listing for the pool/ subdirectory, mostly because
> it contains a lot of files. This might cause higher load, especially if
> someone decides to crawl the directory. Furthermore, which is due to our
> (mis?)configuration, directory indexes are not cached, but instead
> generated by a slow backend server.
> 
> Some people decided to download whole distributions via HTTP(s),
> although we offer rsync access. Disallowing directory listing helps to
> discourage this.

It also helps to discourage people from using your server at all. I have
been using ftp2.de for two decades¹ and am now working hard to get the
"2" out of my finger memory because it doesn't do the service that I
usually need when I manually type the URL. It's just too bad.

Greetings
Marc

¹ I know that ftp2.de used to point to a different machine until like
two years ago, but from a user perspective I am not supposed to care